My Polar Watch - simply Awesome

Not the best of times, but my first 10K in a long while.

I recently bought the Polar M430 as a little present to myself for going through a challenging 2 years of business. My opinion after about 1 and a half months of using it, is that this device is simply "awesome". I am a very late product adopter of the GPS watches having using more than 20 Timex chronograph watches over the last 17 years.

In 2007, I won a Garmin watch with heart rate monitor in a treadmill race. It was a cool toy except for monitoring the heart rate, I had to strap it around my chest like a bra.  The Polar M430 on the other hand has 6 thermal sensing devices to sense the heart rate on my wrist without the use of a chest strap. So technology has enabled the ease of use for this finicky consumer after 10 years. Ha ! 

In addition the M430 has 24/7 tracking of everything from my movements, siiting, standing, running etc. and has many superb tracking features. The features of this awesome toy are heart rate monitor, GPS tracking of your workout on the road, track or off-road trails for one.

Once you activate and stop the training mode (there are about 6 most popular ones), it tracks your maximum and average heart rate, your cadence (number of footstrikes per minute),your kcal burned, the % of fat used during the training (heh I love this one), and finally the distance covered. It will also tell you at the end of each day how much (in %) of the daily target steps (10,000) you have achieved.

You can also track your sleeping time, whether your sleep was interrupted and most ideal number of hours of sleep required, (mine is 8). 

The shop which sold it to me help setup the Polar Flow software, which I am to update my workouts every few days and voila ! there is so much to show there. Your entire workout summary like what I had mentioned above, in addition, there are maps (GPS remember) which show me exactly how far and where I had run. I am also an avid recorder of my workouts so my Workout Summary is also recorded for posterity. 

Finally, this cool video enables me to "relive my run" and thanks to Google Maps (or whatever they use to video this), it shows me again exactly where I ran, my start location (at the exercise station beside carpark B1), my fastest pace of 6:04 min / km just after the yellow lighthouse, where I turned around at Ski 360 and returned back and finished the last km at 7:48 min /km. Video of location, speed, elevation, kcals burned and total workout summary all in the video. 

How cool is that ???